You see, the thing about Kansas is...

Sen. Chris Buttars, R-West Jordan, said Thursday that after talks with the state Superintendent of Public Instruction Patti Harrington, he is comfortable -- at least for now -- with what Utah classrooms are teaching.

"She assured me in a phone call and then followed up with a letter, that we should not be teaching human evolution of any kind," Buttars said Thursday.

The state's core science curricula doesn't teach the evolution of the human species as a scientific fact, Harrington said. It does, however, emphasize that biological diversity is a result of millions of years of evolution.

"Science is a way of knowing and a knowing based up on evidence," Harrington said by telephone from Cedar City Thursday. "There is not evidence yet to claim how the Earth was created and no evidence to connect the family of apes with the family of man."

There's no evolution controversy in Utah. No human evolution, no controversy.

"It's not fact," Buttars said. "It's a theory. You know, the trouble with the missing link, is that it's still missing."

Harrington says some Utah textbooks include information about the origin of man, along with the familiar drawings of hominoids in various stages of development. But nothing in state curricula suggests this information is the sole explanation for the existence of man.

I don't live in Kansas or Utah anymore; I live in Wisconsin. Which itself gets a "D" for evolution education. You see I have my work cut out for me.

John Hawks is the Vilas-Borghesi Distinguished Achievement Professor of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin—Madison. I work on the fossil and genetic record of human evolution (About me).

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